What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate is a measure of the percentage of single-page visits to the total visits on your website.

Let’s say that you are looking at the organic traffic of your site. You find that Bing has a 65% Bounce Rate. It means that 65% of traffic (visitors) coming to your site are browsing only a single page on your website and leaving.

Your visitors may have closed the browser abruptly, or typed a different URL on the address bar on their browser, or simply clicked on one of your social media sites or external blog and sites.

Is High Bounce Rate Bad For Business?

High Bounce Rate may not always indicate that a visitor did not find the content relevant and interesting, or it did not satisfied their drive to click-through the referring link.

Your visitors may land on a web page or a blog posts on your website and find a very relevant and interesting content they were looking after. The blog posts may have all the answers they were seeking; yet still they may not be interested to read everything on the web page and leave after few minutes or few seconds.

On the other hand, a low bounce rate doesn’t mean your visitors are happily engaged with your content either.

You website may have low Bounce Rate, high Pageviews, but very low conversion rate. This usually happens when your visitors may have difficulty finding what they are looking for in your site, even after searching for them and leaving your site unfulfilled.

Bounce Rate Vs. Exit Rate

Bounce Rate refers to the % of single-page visits to overall page visits while Exit Rate, also known as % Exit, is the % of exits that occur on your site.

A visitor who lands on one of your web pages is considered for Bounce Rate as well for Exit Rate for your website. On the other hand, a visitor who lands on one of your web pages and continues to browse through other web pages or blog posts is considered only for your Exit Rate.

So How Do You Improve Your Bounce Rate?

#1: Add more pages on your website and link back to the main page. Create more relevant posts on similar topics to the original landing page. Once these pages are created, insert links throughout the content (not more than 2-3 URLs) that leads your visitors back to the main landing page you want them to see.

Also, you can include a small text right after the posts like a “if you liked this, you may want to check this out” kind of way.

#2: Include other pages that guide and inform your visitors. Remember, not all of your visitors want to buy product from you right away.

A lot of them may want to learn more about it first. So, instead of just having sales copy, you may also want to include some links such as product manual, how to use guides, product review pages, and customer testimonials.

These additional pages will keep the visitor longer on your site and hopefully push them through the sales funnel to increase conversions.

#3: Add links on your sidebar too. A website includes a fixed sidebar section which is displayed throughout the site. Your visitors may land on any web page on your website. They many not even know anything about you. You can have “About Me/Us,” “Services,” “Products,” “Blogs,” and “Contact Us,” links inside this sidebar block.

In addition, you can also link to a page called “Start from here” for new visitors. Or try including “Most Popular Sections,” or “Top Comments” – all of which will drive people deeper into your site.

#4: Keep improving your content. If you find that a particular page on your site has high Bounce Rate as well as low average time on site (people leaving quickly), then you might want to review your content as it may not be answering important questions that your visitors may be looking for.

Offer more useful information to your visitors. Try to answer more questions they may have around the main topics. This will at least convince your visitors to stay for few more minutes.

Include videos, sign up newsletter sections, and social media links to build trust.

If you were interested to lower your bounce rate on your website and thus make your visitors stay longer on your website, then [contact us] for a free bounce rate evaluation (no obligation) for free